Unasked Questions

Last
night I listened to a radio panel show about President Bushs
tax cut plan. The questions the panelists debated revolved around whether
the country can afford big tax cuts now.

Well, I can afford one. How about you?

What struck me about the discussion
was that nobody mentioned the taxpayers rights or whether the
taxing power is already being abused. Such topics just didnt come
up. And these panelists werent all liberals and socialists. One was
a noted libertarian, another a prominent conservative. These champions of
the taxpayer accepted their opponents tacit premise that there is
no limit to what the government may take from the taxpayer, if the
government needs the money.

Have you ever heard a liberal object
that the taxpayer is already overtaxed? No, because anyone who said that
would, almost by definition, not qualify as a liberal. Even though most of
us work several months per year to support the government, liberals never
specify the point at which the government would be, even hypothetically,
taxing at a rate that amounts to imposing involuntary
servitude.

Liberals never tire of denouncing
slavery, by which they mean private-sector chattel slavery. They have no
great objection to the virtual enslavement of the taxpayer. The bibulous
playwright Brendan Behan once said: There is no such thing as a
large whiskey. To a liberal, there is no such thing as a big
government. There is hardly such a thing as an illegitimate function of
government.

Of course there are things liberals
dont want the government to do, but these are matters of
preference, not principle. Liberalism may speak of a few preferred
freedoms  freedom of expression, sexual freedom, and so
forth  but these are arbitrary. It recognizes no principled limit on
the size and scope of the state.

This fact is apparent in the liberal
attitude toward the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is supposed to
define the powers of the federal government  authorizing some
powers, which are enumerated, while reserving all other powers to the
states and the people. This means that the first question we should ask
when a new law is proposed is: Does the Constitution allow the
federal government to do this?

But this basic question is seldom
raised. By liberals, never. They argue that the Constitution forbids the
government  at both federal and state levels  to do certain
things, but these are purely arbitrary limits dictated by their own agenda,
not by the Constitution itself. The Constitution plainly forbids federal gun
control, but liberals ignore that; it says nothing at all about abortion, but
liberals insist that it protects abortion.

The ad hoc constitutional
right to abortion, of course, never occurred to any student
of the Constitution in the first 180 years of its existence. But as soon as
abortion became part of the liberal agenda, it made a sudden debut as an
anomalous constitutional imperative.

Which brings us to a few other
questions liberals never ask. When would it be wrong to kill a fetus? When
does the fetus feel pain? When would the agony it feels during abortion
warrant laws protecting it? Even some liberals, faced with grisly
late-term (partial-birth) abortions, concede that there may
be some limits; but this concession has had to be wrung from them. They
didnt volunteer it. And most liberals still support even the
cruelest abortions.

Conservatives rarely force liberals to
specify just how far they would push their desires for more government
power, higher taxes, and general limits on personal freedom. At what point
would they be satisfied? In what kind of society would liberals become
conservatives  in the sense of contented defenders of the status
quo? What would a liberal utopia look like? Just how would it differ from
outright communism?

Like the fishermans insatiable
wife in the fable, liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is
granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and
ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue
incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination.

So, thanks to the negligence of their
opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding
more while never defining enough. The
predictable result is that they always get more, and its never
enough.

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